Hong Kong’s Wireless Telecom In- dustry Association (HKWTIA), a sort of incubator for the territory’s small mobile technology industry, and Hong Kong’s Productivity Council recently threw a happening for Mobile TV, a collection of views on the development of broadcasting convergence technologies and businesses and their potential in Hong Kong. I find the notion of a government “Productivity Council” backing the development of mobile TV somewhat ironic; the notion that you can channel surf, veg out, and generally kill time in yet another multimedia mode with your phone strikes me as a serious threat to productivity. But I understand where Hong Kong’s government is coming from; the city is very mobile-centric, its economic policy folks are super-desperate to find a technol-ogy-intensive industry that they can use to kick-start – um, create – its high tech economy, and TV has been increasingly seen as the cornerstone application of the convergence era.
While speakers and attendees were both hopeful and pragmatic, full of examples and arguments for Mobile TV’s inevitability, I felt there was a distinct lack of…something. Part of this might be the palpable sense that once again, policy and phone makers alike are beginning to have the application wag the market as with any other would-be killer. Another part might be that perhaps Hong Kong’s faith in its non-interventionist approach to regulation and industry development in some ways runs counter to its attempts to promote it. In her opening address, the Permanent Secretary
for Communications and Technology at Hong Kong’s Commerce, Industry, and Technology Bureau, Marion Lai said, “ responses to regulating new telecoms technologies are country–and culture– specific, and in keeping with Hong Kong’s status as a regional business hub with non-interventionist government, I see no reason to deviate in the case of mobile TV.”
Lai made some references to telecom successes in Hong Kong such as IPTV, and there are, unsurprisingly, some parallels between the development trajectory of mobile television and that of IPTV. The market ingredients that seem to make both forms of broadcast convergence work–lenient regulation, rich consumers, and high penetration of high-speed telecom infrastructure– would seem to imply that Hong Kong in fact would be as successful a mobile TV market as it is an IPTV market. But the fact that PCCW’s 650,000 TV-over-DSL subscribers are still a third of the world’s total says as much (and likely more) about the slow development of the global IPTV world than it does about the speed of Hong Kong’s market. IPTV’s pace has been dragged by a lack of industry standardization and the resulting slowness of appropriate chipsets and compression standards. Added to this has been a lack of cooperation across the telecom-broad-casting “food chain.” Content providers and service operators are only now getting together around common notions of acceptable “broadcast” service quality, customer experience, and billing relationships, and the current small size of
the TV-over-broadband market means that content providers generally have not put nearly as much effort into developing service offers as their telecom peers.
And without content participation, the IPTV-over-broadband industry creeps along rather than gallops, and mobile TV’s progress may proceed at the same speed. It is exciting to think that mobile TV, more so than any other broadcast convergence media, truly has the power to define the very fabric of television offers. At the conference, Juha Lipiainen, Nokia’s Director for Mobile TV Business Development in China, points out that mobile TV usage has been very different to date. Looking at trials in Europe and in Korea, he notes, “We see ‘snacking’ of content between three and ten min-utes…. We also see the times Asian consumers are watching–during commute time and on their lunch breaks–create new opportunities for viewing that didn’t exist before.”
On the service, even it never rivals television consumption at home. The ability to sneak into another sliver of consumer time has to be attractive to programmers, advertisers, and service providers. It also appears that the industry is quickly gathering around some technology consensus in a conscious effort to avoid some of the market inertia that was created over the last couple of years in the IPTV space. “We are very committed to open standards. We believe DVB-H is the best, but we are open,” says Ian Chapman-Banks, Beijing-based VP and General Manager, Marketing and Business Development, North Asia, Mobile Devices for Motorola. He points to Korea–everyone points to Korea–as a market where innovation in
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